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First Lady Michelle Obama waves as she appears at the podium for a camera test on the stage at the Democratic National Convention inside Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday, Sept. 3, 2012
The Associated Press

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Even those who praised Ms. Obama’s speech couldn’t help bringing attention to her verbal stumbling.

“Boy, did she knock it out of the park last night! If the stutter and the cracking voice at the end were not practised, they could not have been bettered,” Bloomberg’s Ramesh Ponnuru stated.

According to Gawker, Ms. Obama’s stammer was indeed practised as a tactic to exude sincerity. “It is not so much a rhetorical device as an acting device,” Hamilton Nolan wrote. “The same could be said for the presentation of almost all political convention speeches. And it is, at its core, sad.”

“I have seen first-hand that being president doesn’t change who you are. No, it-it reveals who you are …”

“If-if farmers and-and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire, if-if immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores … then surely, surely, we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American dream …”

Earlier this year, disgraced America’s Got Talent contestant Timothy Poe was caught out for fabricating a story about developing a stutter due to a brain injury sustained while serving in Afghanistan. Some questioned the authenticity of the stutter itself.

Interestingly, others wondered whether Mr. Poe was a lifelong stutterer who was so embarrassed by his speech impediment that he made up a story to cover for it.

Clearly, faking a stutter to elicit sympathy is ugly business. But calling out alleged phonies is risky too. What if they truly can’t help their stammer?